Key events
Dropped!
57th over: New Zealand 260-3 (Nicholls 120, Mitchell 37) You remember those pictures of Jofra howling with frustration last night? He’s already been doing it again. His first ball is a beauty, squaring up Daryl Mitchell and drawing the edge – which is dropped by Harry Brook at slip. Brook has had such a poor match, bringing one great shot when England needed him to be the senior pro. Archer beats Mitchell next ball, and has a shout for LBW against him (going down). Some of the blame belongs to Root, who started with only one slip, then moved himself back in there afterwards. Along the way, the batters calmly collect eight runs, four from that drop. It’s a cruel game.
The players are out there. Joe Root is chatting to Matt Fisher, whose batting gave England a glimmer of hope yesterday morning. And the ball is with Jofra Archer, who will come gliding in from the pavilion end.
England have also missed Ollie Pope. He was the odd-job man under Stokes, ready to take over as the captain or the keeper, and doing both jobs well enough to attract little comment. With hindsight, he would have been a better understudy for Jamie Smith here than poor James Rew. As would Jonny Bairstow.
On Sky they’re talking about … Ben Stokes. He’s been missed as a captain, standing at mid-off, exuding energy, bigging up the bowler with his belief. He’s been missed as a bowler: this morning, at 250 for three, he would be handing the ball to himself. And he’s even been missed as a batter. Scratchy as he has been recently, he can still stick around, as he showed in Australia. With the bat, Ben Stokes has turned into Ben Foakes – the designated driver in a team of drinkers. The whole package means that when he’s there, England have 12 or 13 players, and when he’s not, they have nine or ten.
If you’d like some action right away, there’s a World Cup match just starting in Southampton. It’s another episode in a long-running series: David v Goliath. Do join Megan Maurice to see if Babette de Leede’s bowlers can rattle Australia’s big names.
Preamble
Morning everyone, or should that be hello darkness, my old friend? For England supporters of a certain age, this match has been a flashback to the Eighties. First the management picked the wrong response to Ben Stokes’ and Gus Atkinson’s big night out, suspending them when Harry Brook had merely been fined for a worse offence, perhaps because the ECB was afraid of looking weak. Then, just as fortune favours the brave, so misfortune homed in on the faint-hearted.
England lost the Player of the Match from Lord’s, Ollie Robinson, to injury and their wicketkeeper, Jamie Smith, to the birth of his second child. Suddenly the team had no spine – no captain, no keeper, no new-ball pair. The selectors put their faith in what Micky Stewart, whose name is on the pavilion at the Oval, once called “a lot of inexperience”. Joe Root found himself not so much the stand-in captain as the babysitter.
The kids were all right at first, then fell apart as Root tried too hard to play the Stokes way and get funky with his fields. The New Zealanders, who are known on the circuit as nice guys, have been far more orthodox and more efficient. By the end of yesterday the crowd was witnessing an unprecedented spectacle: the England Lions being fed to the Christians.
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